


The Unicorn

by Delphi



Series: Fantastic Beasts [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Drama, Field Trip, M/M, Science, Unicorns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-15
Updated: 2013-07-15
Packaged: 2017-12-20 06:12:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/883870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Delphi/pseuds/Delphi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Severus Snape is invited on two very different field trips.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Unicorn

Spring took its time in coming. It always did in Hogsmeade, creeping north slowly throughout March and April, and usually running far behind schedule by the time it climbed into the mountains. Nonetheless, that year it seemed significant when the Easter weekend came and the weather was still miserably grey and chill. It had been winter for as long as Severus could remember, and when the school emptied out for the holiday, the rooms and corridors felt so cold that he half expected to see his own breath indoors.

His plan had been to cloister himself in his apartments for the entire duration with some work, a book or two, and a medicinal cigarette. However, he was surprised when he arrived for dinner on Good Friday to find Kettleburn in attendance at the head table for the first time since Christmas.

“Professor Snape, there you are!” Kettleburn waved him over and patted the empty chair next to him. “Have a seat.”

Severus looked at the chair, which was near the end of the table, between Kettleburn and Professor Vector. He usually sat at Professor Dumbledore’s left. “That’s not my chair.”

“It will be if you sit in it.”

He hesitated before sitting down and then found that no one commented. 

“Rolanda,” Kettleburn said, turning to Madam Hooch on his right, “you’ve met Severus Snape, haven’t you?”

“I have, yes.” Madam Hooch leaned around Kettleburn and gave Severus a cheeky grin. “Silvanus seems to think that just because he stays in his rooms all the time, the rest of us do too.”

“How do you manage to get your meals delivered?” Severus asked. He was aware of Professor Dumbledore sending menacingly cheerful and inquisitive looks down the length of the table.

“You have to claim invalidity, I’m afraid.”

“Useful, that,” Madam Hooch said. 

Severus raised an eyebrow at the barb, but Kettleburn only laughed.

A lamb dinner and the trimmings popped onto the table, and Severus dropped his napkin in his lap and reached for a roll. The Great Hall was only sparsely populated, with fewer than a dozen students per house remaining for the holiday. Meals were usually noisy affairs, with an annoying buzz of student conversation blanketing everything else. Now it was quiet enough that Severus was conspicuously aware of every word that passed his lips.

Kettleburn and Madam Hooch carried most of the conversation, with the occasional question nudged his way. No, he supposed he wouldn’t mind refereeing the occasional Quidditch match. He would have to side with Professor Kettleburn and agree that ham was preferable for an Easter dinner. Yes, he supported the Arrows, what of it?

“What are the Arrows?” Kettleburn asked absently, leaning across the table to seize a trifle dish when it appeared.

“A Quidditch team,” Madam Hooch said, sounding as if she had explained this many times before.

“Ah,” Kettleburn said, dishing out ample slices first to Severus, then to Madam Hooch, and finally to himself. “Speaking of something far more interesting, I was wondering if you’d like to do some fieldwork with me this weekend, Professor Snape.”

The question took Severus aback. “What sort of fieldwork?”

“It’s foaling season for the unicorns. We have the largest concentration of them in Britain, you know, and I like to take a small survey every spring.”

“This would entail trudging through the Forbidden Forest?”

“Somewhere between a trudge and a traipse, I’d say.”

Severus regarded him incredulously. It was barely above freezing outside, and it had been drizzling continuously for a month. He had absolutely no desire to get soggy feet in the best case scenario and potentially find himself flayed by a centaur in the worst. 

‘Of course not,’ he intended to say, but when Kettleburn smiled warmly at him, some connection between brain and mouth was inadvertently and inexplicably cut. 

“All right,” he said. “I suppose so.”

He blamed it on the lack of sleep.

Saturday morning found Severus tramping through the damp and darkness of the Forbidden Forest. He had ignored Kettleburn's suggestion to wear trousers, owing to the fact that he did not own any, and he was now having to frequently untangle his robes from the underbrush as the castle disappeared behind him and the murky shadows swallowed him up.

Kettleburn was walking some ways ahead, looking like he ought to have been on the telly, on one of those nature programmes that Severus had occasionally watched as a child. He was dressed in trousers and a khaki shirt, with a grey slouch hat on his head, and he looked...intrepid. 

Severus himself was not feeling particularly intrepid. He had slept poorly, and at one point in the night, wound up and frustrated, he had taken a swing at the headboard and bruised his hand rather badly.

He pulled a face as his foot sank into a puddle. "I would have thought," he said sourly, "that Hagrid would leap at the chance to assist you."

"Hagrid," Kettleburn said, his voice diplomatic, "is a fine soul. Very enthusiastic. _Very_ enthusiastic. Enthusiastic to the point that I cannot cope with him before noon. Besides, unicorns are skittish around giants."

"I thought they were skittish around everyone."

"It varies. They might be more forthcoming with a pair of maidens, but as long as we stay downwind, they shouldn't mind us."

Severus halted. "I thought that virgin nonsense was legend."

"Hm?" Kettleburn glanced over his shoulder and then stopped and waited for Severus to catch up. "No, actually. The precise mechanism by which they can perceive it isn't known, but tests seem to bear it out. Some think it's an adaptive trait."

Severus frowned. "Pardon?"

"A mutation that proved more conducive to self-preservation than the alternative. Some suppose that unicorns are by nature attracted to wizards. Wizards have a nasty habit, however, of hunting them for parts. Therefore, unicorns that restricted their friendliness to the young were more likely to survive until breeding age than those willing to approach adults."

"It seems to me a better trait would be to avoid human beings altogether."

"Perhaps. Although one could argue that if unicorns were entirely elusive, we wouldn't be willing to preserve forests for them. That said, evolution isn't about what works best, it's about what works well enough to be getting on with. Sometimes a species is still alive simply because it hasn't died off yet.”

At that, Severus fell silent, and he held his tongue until they came to a clearing in the middle of the woods and set up a viewing station on a small hill overlooking a spring. He sat gingerly on a log beside Kettleburn and pulled his cloak closer around his shoulders against the damp.

To his chagrin, the morning provided a surprisingly good show. Severus had never seen a unicorn properly in the wild, but he was soon spoilt for choice. Every fifteen or twenty minutes, they would catch sight of a new beast creeping up to the spring to drink, some with foals in tow, and Kettleburn would make quick sketches in a small book before comparing notes with a list, presumably comprised of a previous trip's sightings.

"Ah," Kettleburn murmured fondly as a silvery mare led her foal away from the spring and back into the woods. "That one was a foal herself the first year I taught here."

Severus coloured in uncomfortable embarrassment when Kettleburn put a hand on his shoulder and pointed, prodding him to peer eastwards into the woods where he glimpsed several beasts moving among the trees.

"See? They're usually solitary creatures, but in spring, the mares will band together for protection while they're slowed down with young. They're rather more like deer than horses in that respect."

The hand dropped, but it was back a few minutes later as a particularly large beast ambled up to the spring.

"Our first stallion," Kettleburn whispered. "You can tell by his size, and by the narrower bands on his horn." He paused as the beast turned around. "And, of course, by the massive set of testicles he just flashed our way.”

Severus's loud snort sent the unicorn scampering back into the cover of the trees, and Kettleburn chuckled as he returned to his sketching. 

He was in slightly better spirits their second morning out. Fresh air had proved a panacea, and he had returned to the castle the previous afternoon almost pleasantly hungry and tired, wolfing down a sandwich before falling into a long nap. 

"Do you do much fieldwork?" he asked, once they had settled in and the complicated system of notebooks were laid out. 

"As much as I can," Kettleburn said, smiling. "I'm in East Africa every summer, continuing my research on the Nundu. It's why I took this job, really. For every ten months of labour, I have two off to do what I love."

Severus tried to imagine some future in which he was doing what he loved. He could imagine neither what that might be nor the plausibility of it.

Damp robes and burrs in his socks aside, it was not until the final morning out that he regretted coming. It was perhaps ten o'clock―the clouds had finally cleared enough to see the sun, although it barely peeked through the dense canopy of the forest―and Kettleburn had gone off to, as he put it, "water a bush," when greenery rustled behind him.

Severus turned, his hand going to his wand instinctively, as he was certain that Kettleburn had walked off in the other direction. The golden unicorn stepped out from between the trees and blinked at his upraised wand, seemingly unimpressed.

"Shoo," Severus said. Up close, the beast seemed enormous. It was perhaps a little smaller than a horse, but nonetheless larger than anything he wished to have looming over him. "Go away."

The unicorn took another step forward, then another, and then it folded itself down with stunning grace and laid its head in Severus's lap.

"Oh, buggerty-fuck," Severus muttered, thoroughly pinned down.

The creature gazed up at him adoringly.

Severus was tempted to give it a good shove, but then he remembered what Kettleburn had said about unicorns and objects moving suddenly towards their heads. While Care of Magical Creatures could presumably be carried out with a set of enchanted metal fingers, Potions likely could not.

His face was thoroughly red and his legs were asleep by the time the brush in the opposite direction was disturbed. He turned his head and caught sight of Kettleburn scribbling in his sketchbook a few yards away. It was at least three excruciating minutes later when the man finally started forward, his noisy footsteps spooking the unicorn, which scrambled upright and trotted away into the trees.

"Oh look," Kettleburn said, staring deliberately out over the spring, "a bowtruckle."

Severus's mistake was in thinking that would be the end of it. A week passed, and then several. Spring finally settled in, cool and sunny. Kettleburn continued to occasionally insist on company to town. Severus took payment in cigarettes. It seemed the whole embarrassing incident might truly have been discreetly forgotten. Or so he thought until the very last day of the term came and went, when the school had emptied out save for the staff, who were left to finish up their marking and packing.

Someone knocked on his office door. Severus, smudged with ink and currently tempted to set an entire stack of final essays on fire, glowered menacingly down at his desk. "Go away!"

The door opened anyhow, and Kettleburn peered inside. "Are you busy, Professor Snape?"

"Yes," Severus said, doing his best to keep his tone on this side of civil.

"Can your work wait until morning?"

He should have said no, but he was distracted by the fact that Kettleburn was incongruously wearing quite a good set of evening robes. "Why?"

"Because, my young friend," Kettleburn said, a vulpine grin breaking out on his narrow face, "we are going to the brothel."


End file.
